No Longer Safe for Work: Blogs

Robert Mason (not his real name) would love to spend a few minutes during lunch catching up on blog posts from around the web, but his company doesn't allow it. The financial institution where Mason works as a vice president has security filters set up to block access to -- among other things -- any website that contains the phrase "blog" in the URL.

What's more, says Mason, such practices are becoming prevalent in corporate America, particularly in financial services. Mason sits on a roundtable privacy group of 20 of the country's largest banks. "My best understanding is that my company's anti-blog stance is the industry norm," he says.

Filtering out every blog isn't a completely feasible project (and, in fact, Mason says his company's filter doesn't catch everything), but the technology to censor the lion's share of blogs is fairly commonplace. From installing simple URL filters and content scanners to blacklisting ranges of IP addresses, myriad methods for shutting out blog content are available.

If nothing else, the corporate firewall can simply add the word "blog" to the company's list of verboten phrases that trigger blocking, alongside "games," "warez" and "britney spears sex tape."

Excertos do artigo de Christopher Null | In Wired News

Que será do nosso hobby laboral se isto começar a ser implementado aqui?! :-)